Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is like a stinking cat tied around their neck and they cannot find a way to get rid of it.

It is a gold mine for us. We will go around every working-class seat and say: ‘Your jobs are on the line. You’ve got a choice. If you want to vote for Kevin Rudd, you’ll be voting for an ETS. You will be voting for a stinking cat that is going to cost you $120 billion, it’s going to put the industries that you work in—the mining industries, the aluminium industry, the steel industry, the glass industry, the cement industry—at risk and it’s going to put your jobs at risk. The government will make your industries anti-competitive. It was so before Copenhagen, but it is doubly so now.’ But the government are hell-bent on putting this legislation through. They come here and want to get it through. They want to get it through today. I would not vote for something that is not even a true reflection of what is in the bill. The bill is finished. They have to go back and remodel it, present their remodelling to the parliament and then ask the parliament to vote on something that is real. But they are presenting a fraud, a con to the parliament of Australia and they know it.

The modelling is wrong. Canada, United States, China, Russia—the big emitters—have said, ‘We’re not going to have a bar of this.’ And you could have said that before we even went to Copenhagen. How could America, with 10 per cent unemployment—it would probably be worse if it did not have such a huge defence force—vote for it? How could it get through congress? It just could not. It was never going to work. But those opposite believe they can get it through in some sneaky way in a form that is not really reflecting what is in the bill.

If the Labor Party want to go ahead with this—I cannot see how they can get out of it—then with Senator Joyce and Senator Bernardi and Senator ‘Whacker’ Williams, I will be out in the field. This is politics. We will be telling all of those blue-collar workers that Labor has ratted on them. The Labor people have ratted on the blue-collar worker because they want to keep the green section of their party happy!